Saturday, September 19, 2009

Rubity, Scrubity, Sweepity

I can feel it.

Creeping on.

Steadily, as I putter around the house.

I put things away, I throw away papers, I sort piles.

My hands start inching up to my scalp to pull out all my hair and rend my clothes.

Every fall, just like every spring, I get this way. It always comes right around the equinox... "First Day of Spring" "First Day of Fall"... It's just like a werewolf transformation, except without all the fur and teeth and nails and blood. Uh, yeah, just like that.

ARG! This place is a mess!

It didn't bother me all summer, but now... oh the piles, the dustbunnies, the junk covering every flat surface.

WHO is going to clean this up? Who is going to sort and throw things away? Who's going to take a truckload to Goodwill? Who's going to build me some shelves and then spend piles of money on trendy little shelf baskets and other wonders of organization? Who was supposed to be keeping up on things so that I don't get carried away by accumulation?

WHO????

Where is my housekeeper?

Where is my trusty assistant?

Where is my work crew? The hired help?

How about a devoted domiciliary domestic?

HANDMAIDENS! Doesn't the Bible say something about "handmaidens"??? Where do I get some handmaidens?

Sigh.

It's that time of year where I wish I could just hit the "refresh" button on my whole house. Then I would go hang a few new pictures and get on with life.

I hate cleaning. I'd rather read a book, make cheese, formulate more fantastic kitchen experiments, and color in all the o's and a's and p's on the junk mail.

I'm no good at this. I don't know where to start. I want to move the piano into the living room so that I can actually play it (har, har, I kid myself). To do that, I first have to move everything out and get the floor repainted. THEN I can move in the piano (after I get all the loose change and various books cleaned off the top), as well as my grandma's china hutch that is being stored at church so that I can fill it with the china that I don't have the pretty table cloths and glasses that are currently stored in boxes upstairs, the finding of which will require me to clean and sort boxes upstairs... Gar. I'm tired just thinking about it.

That's not even taking into account the pile of papers on the peninsula and the pile of papers on the desk and the pile of papers on the table.

I wasn't kidding about those shelves. I want my husband to build some shelves --floor to ceiling-- in a naked corner of the living room, but he hardly has time for that. I'd love to come across a great, big bookshelf or shelving unit to put there, but what are the chances? I love organization and having a place for everything, but the problem is in having the means to be organized. And then there's the issue of every time I talk to him about shelves or storage, he argues that we wouldn't have such a need if we didn't have so much stuff. I counter that I don't keep things that we don't use and I try to keep on top of getting rid of useless things that find there way here and the fact is that busy (and frugal) people simply must have certain tools and just wait until Jonah's in full-blown homeschool! And then he says to get rid of more stuff and you can see how this whole argument goes nowhere fast.

But I digress.

My whole point is that my house is crying out for a little attention and organization and I'm too lazy to get to it.

You know in The Sword in the Stone when Merlin sets the dishes to washing themselves so they could go outside and do more important things like learning stuff? Yeah. That's what I want.

6 comments:

What would be neat is if we did all help each other. You know hand maidens, or old maids, or old matrons as it were. The question is if the handmaidens arrive are your really ready to work? It is work. You are right we need storage. I don't know what happened but my husband and I don't argue about that anymore. I think I gave in some areas important to him where I was bucking and then his heart softened towards me, and he finally listened, and looked, and saw, and then he helped me. He keeps helping me. As long as two can pull together they can accomplish anything. You have been so sick, how far away is your house from mine? Like in hours of driving?

I love this posting!! It made it smile and relate. Now if all those friends in blogger world could visit each other on a regular basis, we would have teamwork and that is how things get done. I am on your side for the shelves. It will make a great difference. Hang in there.

When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be...

I'm a homeworking wife/mom. I'm married to a hard-working Lutheran pastor and we have three little boys and a sweet little girl who are growing way too fast. We are renovating and living in an antique crumbling ruin of a farm house. I am an unconventional health-nut. This blog is just snippets from my daily life, random splashes of paint.